IADA just reported Q1 2026 closed deals at 333, up from 316 a year ago, extending a five-year streak of consecutive first-quarter increases. Transactions are closing in 150 days, compared to an industry average of 212. Demand outpaces supply, values hold firm, and Honeywell’s latest Global Business Aviation Outlook projects 8,500 new jet deliveries over the next decade at $283 billion, the highest number in the report’s 34-year history.
Let the good times roll is the prevalent attitude in the market, and complacency may be creeping in. Use it to your advantage.
Andy Grove built Intel into one of the most dominant companies on the planet and still operated like the whole thing could disappear tomorrow. His line was simple: “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Jeff Bezos ran Amazon the same way, telling his people for two decades that it was still “Day 1” because the alternative was stasis, irrelevance, and death. Both of them understood that the time to gain ground on your competition is when they’ve stopped trying to gain ground on you.
The Preparation Window
Connor Lokar is the Senior Forecaster at ITR Economics, the oldest privately held economic research firm in the country. ITR carries a 94.7% long-term forecasting accuracy rate and has been projecting a Great Depression beginning in 2030 and lasting through 2036 since it published Prosperity in the Age of Decline back in 2014. Not a mild recession, but a full depression driven by converging demographic decline, rising healthcare costs, and compounding government debt. It’s time to prepare.
Pedal Faster and Build the Playbook
A strong market is the best time to generate the cash that lets you play offense when the cycle turns. Run your revenue engine harder right now. Don’t let your sales teams get lazy. Eliminate weak prospecting, sloppy qualification, and slow follow-up. The time to install real outbound discipline and push conversion rates is while volume gives you room to absorb mistakes. The margin you capture now is the war chest you’ll deploy when the cycle turns.
At the same time, build your downturn playbook while you can still think clearly. That means getting specific about which competitors are overleveraged and could become acquisition targets, which markets or service lines you’d expand into if the cost of entry dropped, who the best people in your space are, and what it would take to bring them over, and what equipment or fleet assets you’d want to pick up at a discount. That thinking is free right now, but nearly impossible to do well once decisions have to happen fast.
Warren Buffett has said it for decades: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” That advice is useless unless you’ve done the work during the greedy years to be in a position to act during the fearful ones. The companies that come out of downturns in a dominant position get there because they did the strategic work during the good times and had the cash to execute when the window opened.
The next 36 months are a positioning window. You can use that time to build the war chest and the playbook that lets you move on acquisitions, talent, and market share when your competition is trying to figure out what happened. Or you can assume the game never changes.
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